BUFFLEHEAD, a small plump duck of American inland waters (Charionetta albeola), remarkable for its beauty of coloring. It is about 13 inches in length, and the plumage of the drake is black and white, with the crested head, shaped like a puff-ball, rich, silky, changing green. The female is smaller, and more protectively colored in a dull-brown plumage, with white markings. Its food con sists of larva: shells, seeds, etc., and it fre quents gravelly shores and wooded ponds, breeding in holes of trees and burrows, from the Great Lakes northward to the Arctic Circle. It lays about 12 large, dark-colored eggs. It is of small value to the sportsman, and requires little skill in shooting, except when on the wing, at which time it is remarkable for the speed with which it flies, and the peculiar whistling sound of its wings. It is sometimes called •butterball,* because of its roundness, and aspiritdudc,* a name derived from the In dians, owing to its faculty for vanishing and reappearing from the surface of the water with amazing skill.
BUFFON,
George Louis Leclerc (Comm DE), French naturalist of distinction: b. Montbard, Burgundy, 7 Sept. 1707; d. Paris, 16 April 1788. He received from his father, Ben
Leclerc, counsellor to the Parliament of is province, a careful education. Chance con nected him at Dijon with the young Duke of Kingston, whose tutor, a man of learning, in spired him with a taste for the sciences. They traveled together through France and Italy, and Buffon afterward visited England. In order to perfect himself in the language without neglecting the sciences, he translated Newton's
Buffon published alone the five volumes on minerals, from 1783 to 1788. Of the seven supplementary volumes, of which the last did not appear until 1789, after his death, the fifth formed an independent whole, the most celebrated of all his works. It contains his